My Kids Deserve Better

This week, a trio of fiscally conservative House Republicans
released a document painting a dire picture of the country’s
finances. “Over the last five years,” they write, “federal
spending has increased from nearly 20 percent as a share of the
economy to 24.7 percent as the government’s expenditures
[...]

There is something way off balance in the character of
Barack Obama. Something in the realm of zealotry, with a touch of
megalomania, and perhaps an authoritarian impulse too. He
combines  Alinskyite
tactics and
outlook with an air of self-assumed moral
superiority in a way [...]

The poor black and Latino children attending Sacred Heart School
in the Columbia Heights section of Washington, D.C., probably
don’t know that Century Foundation Senior Fellow Richard
Kahlenberg
thinks their participation in the D.C. Opportunity
Scholarship and other voucher plans merely helps to make
“’separate-but-equal’ work.” [...]

President Barack Obama will soon be entering the lion’s den of
Middle East politics with the same conviction that has guided all
his predecessors — that the solution to the Arab-Israeli
conflict lies in the Two-State Solution, leading to the early
establishment of a Palestinian state.

The received [...]

Back in the days of World War II the Soviets had one former
foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, and a current FM, Vyacheslav
Molotov, to share the two-faced duties of chief foreign
representative of the USSR. Litvinov would butter up the
politicos in Washington and London while Molotov was Mr.
[...]

It was a sunny, warm March day, the first truly pleasant day of
the year, but there was a dark cloud on the horizon.

I had just finished a brisk walk around the block, enjoying
the sun on my untanned face and the crisp winter air in my lungs,
[...]

The Wolfman remake, directed by Joe Johnston and
starring Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, and Hugo
Weaving, is a mostly faithful and sometimes worthy update of the
original, 1941’s Universal classic starring Lon Chaney, Jr. and
Claude Rains. The move alters a number of things, but the [...]

CHOICE WORDS
Re: Jeffrey Lord’s
An Open Letter to Michael Smerconish and Jennifer
Stockman:

Toward the end of Jeffrey Lord’s open letter,
addressed to Michael Smerconish and to me (February 24, 2010), he
poses the central question of his marathon missive: “At some
point, one [...]

Forgive me this stream of consciousness. I had another
topic in mind entirely for this column, but the live coverage of
this health care “summit” has distracted me all day. President
Obama’s superciliousness infuriates me; his insistence on
speaking each time between each speaker is outrageous; his
Democratic [...]

About halfway through yesterday’s all-day healthcare
summit, Democratic Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina
told another of the many insurance horror stories that peppered
the proceedings:

A gentleman was called in and he was very, very emotional. He
was getting ready to have transplant [...]

TAMPA – “Moderate” Florida governor Charlie Crist’s Senate
campaign is circling the drain. And it’s mostly his own fault.

Crist, a formerly conservative politician who “grew in
office” after becoming governor in 2007, went through a 50-point
lead over conservative former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio
faster than [...]

Catholics, the world over, are in the midst of the Lenten
season. Lent, of course, means many things to many people. For
some, it is a time of preparation. For others, it is about
sacrifice. For me, Lent has always meant, first and foremost,
fish on Fridays.

When [...]

Readers of TAS’s website may be familiar with my growing
obsession with America’s looming disaster due to over-spending,
debt and, most importantly, endless entitlement spending
currently on auto-pilot, a kind of ravenous beast consuming most
of our seed corn now and into the future.

I have previously described [...]

Perhaps we’ve all been brainwashed by Hollywood’s version of
international assassination operations, but from the standpoint
of logic alone one assumes that a professional service or
individual does not take on the physical and political dangers of
killing someone unless there is a clear benefit to the action. So
[...]

Thanks to two developments—the nomination of
Sonia Sotomayor and the decision of the Supreme Court to hear the
gun-rights case McDonald v.
Chicago—the question of judicial philosophy has
recently, once again, been in the news. The first of these
developments united conservatives, whereas the second divided
them.

[...]

Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart may have the longest
establishing segment in film history, an introduction lasting for
most of the movie and consisting of repeated examples of the
dissolution of Jeff Bridges’s dissolute country singer, “Bad”
Blake — examples, therefore, of what makes him bad, as well as
[...]

February is an important month in the history of American
commerce. In this month is the birthday of one of the country’s
earliest business innovators and large-scale entrepreneurs.

During a time period of America’s existence as an English colony
and then a young nation — when, to put it [...]

My friend
Robert Stacy McCain is a great reporter,
but he really needs to stick with topics he has a longer history
covering, rather than just parachuting in to a state (that he was
not directly covering at the time and where he has not lived for
[...]

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was baffled by
Rick Warren’s question about when, in the candidate’s view, a
baby gets human rights. Obama’s stammering response ended with
his instantly-famous line that the
question was “above my pay grade.”

Obama seems to have embraced a similar approach to [...]

Friday Nightmare
of travel. I started out this afternoon in Little Rock, Arkansas.
I spoke last night in Conway, very near Little Rock, at a
fabulous place called the University of Central Arkansas. It was
a perfect event, with friendly locals at a dinner with the
President of [...]

Damn. This one hurt.

As is often the case when I’m doing brain-dead chores, I
was listening to a book while wrangling a load of laundry Sunday
afternoon. In this case a “Books on Tape” production of Dead
Heat, one of the best of Dick Francis’s recent works. I’d
[...]

There is a truly evocative scene in the Jewish tradition
concerning the return home of the warriors of Gad and Reuben
after the war to conquer Israel. The Bible describes the
arrangement Moses made with the tribes of Gad and Reuben (Numbers
32:1-33, Deuteronomy 3:18-20). They could keep the [...]

When I began law school at Georgetown, it was the golden
era for well-paid corporate legal work. If you put in your three
years at a halfway-decent law school and made modest grades, a
law firm would hire you at an outrageous salary. It was the norm
[...]

Leon Wieseltier created a stir this week when he floated the
idea that Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan’s harsh
attacks on Israel may be motivated by anti-Semitism.

For good reason, many argue that Sullivan should not be taken
seriously and deserves to be ignored. Yet he still drives
political [...]

It will come as no news to readers of The American
Spectator that science is now no longer just science
but has become a religion-substitute for a large number of
Americans. This faith, perhaps, claims even a majority of those
in some other liberal democracies of the West. And if [...]

Obamacare is dead. The politicians, journalists and bloggers who
continue to talk about passing “reform” via reconciliation or
some other procedural skullduggery are like those characters in
the comedy, Weekend at Bernie’s, who lug a corpse around
pretending it’s still alive. It is, of course, possible — even
[...]

The hot joke in political circles lately is about the three girls
on Career Day telling the class what their mothers do for a
living. One says her mom is a seamstress, one says her mom is a
nurse and the last declares hers to be an exotic dancer.

[...]

This week the British medical journal Lancet
officially retracted an already discredited article it published
by Andrew Wakefield which falsely claimed vaccines caused autism.
(See how the journal was shamed into doing the right thing
here.)

At the same time, President Obama increased the budget of
the [...]

There it is in plain sight — a full-scale civil war in Mexico
that continues to be downplayed by Washington as just another
battle among rival drug traffickers. Treated by the State
Department and Homeland Security as simply a domestic criminal
problem across the border, this no-holds-barred insurgency
[...]

You’ve probably noticed that the one criticism that drives
Obama defenders up the wall is when their idol is called
“skinny.” It can’t help that he vacations along Hawaii’s beaches,
where if you’re skinny and not a surfer — which he isn’t –
you’re likely to be thought of [...]

Rap and economics rarely — no, never — go hand-in hand. That is
until recently when Russ Roberts, a professor of economics at
George Mason University and fellow at the Hoover Institution,
colluded with John Papola, an executive producer at Spike TV, to
create “Fear
the Boom and [...]

BLOWING UP A BUBBLE
Re: William Tucker’s
Taxpayers, Meet Your New Tenants:

“‘The silver lining,’ Schumer told the crowd that gathered in
front of Stuyvesant Town last Sunday, ‘is that the two largest
creditors are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and we have some
leverage over [...]

When Lou Dobbs stepped away from his desk at CNN, where he
was a founding anchor, for the last time, the headlines buzzed
with speculation about what might be next for the controversial
commentator. National Public Radio, for instance, reported
that Lou Dobbs Tonight was
ended so that [...]

And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humpty together again.

And there’s the problem, I thought, as I watched and
listened to our puffed up and preening president yammer on about
jobs and joblessness. Does he really think that it is within his
[...]

On September 18, 2009, The Prowler
reported that a small Silicon Valley technology
company, Adara Networks, had solved the long-standing problem of
interoperability within the Department of Defense (DOD) and
Veterans Administration electronic health records system.

In fact, one of the key planks to President Barack Obama’s
[...]

On December 11, 2009, columnist David Brooks repeated a
story on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that he had said in an
interview in the Atlantic on the Monday before President
Obama’s election. On December 11, it was in the context of the
President’s speech accepting the Nobel [...]

Going Rogue: An American Life
By Sarah Palin
(HarperCollins,
413 pages, $28.99)
 

What’s not to like
about Sarah Palin — for a conservative
or a Republican? Her autobiography makes it abundantly clear why
the liberal United Nations-hugging big-government socialist
fascist gangster [...]

As the guarantor of the international system, the United States
cannot afford to substantially scale back its current
responsibilities, whether in Europe, where Vladimir Putin’s
Russia casts a pall on the general peace; in East Asia, where
China is [...]

For President Barack Obama, Scott Brown’s victory over Martha
Coakley in the U.S. Senate special election could at the very
least lead to a drastically scaled-down version of his healthcare
reform plan. But for the National Education Association, the
American Federation of Teachers and suburban school districts, it
[...]

RESOURCE CURSE
Re: George H. Wittman’s Ghana’s
Oil Bonanza Battle:

At first glance, the promise of Ghana’s impending oil boom paints
a picture of a country with everything to gain. But as Mr.
Wittman rightly stated, when oil arrives on the scene, things can
get complicated quite quickly. [...]